Woman arrested for polygamy in Egypt

An Egyptian woman has been detained for polygamy after one of her husbands discovered she had been married to two other men with whom she also had chi

An Egyptian woman has been detained for polygamy after one of her husbands discovered she had been married to two other men with whom she also had children, police said Tuesday.

According to Egyptian and Islamic law, a man may marry up to four women, however a woman is permitted no more than one husband.

Suleiman Attiyeh, an expatriate worker living in a Gulf Arab country, learned recently that his wife of three years, Amal Mustafa Ali, aged 36, had married another man before him, with whom she also had two children.

Police subsequently found during interrogation that Amal, who had given Suleiman Attiyeh one son, had married another man in an Orfi (customary) marriage and given birth to a girl. Such marriages are conducted before two witnesses and are undocumented, AFP reported.

Amal, who was arrested on Sunday in the northern Cairo neighborhood of Ain Shams, will go on trial in a family court next week, police said.

They said Attiyeh caught his wife when he followed her to the home of her first husband, after she had raised suspicions by continuously asking to spend nights with her family in spite of Attiyeh's long absences in the Gulf.

It was not clear whether each man knew which children were theirs. Nor did the police say whether the other husbands had assumed all the children were their own, or whether they had failed to notice Amal's pregnancies for reasons not disclosed.

Meanwhile, in another case of a woman accused of polygamy, a newspaper in Cairo reported last August that Sabah Abdel Kader, 32, had been arrested for being married to five men at the same time. (Albawaba.com)